THE POP LIFE

THE POP LIFE; Native Genre Takes Pride Of Place at The Grammys

By NEIL STRAUSS

Published: February 21, 2001

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 20—
''I was supposed to retire when we went to three digits,'' said Michael Greene, the president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which produces the Grammy Awards. ''I promised everyone.''

Mr. Greene was talking about the number of Grammy award categories, which expanded to 100 this year, compared with 28 in 1958, the year of the Grammys' conception, when Henry Mancini and Domenico Modugno walked away with the top awards. Tonight the 43rd Annual Grammy Awards will be broadcast live on CBS from the Staples Center here.

The category that helped push the Grammys into three-digit territory (from 98 last year) is best Native American music album, an award that those in the American Indian music industry have spent 10 years clamoring for. (The other new award was for best pop instrumental album.) After a Grammy rejection in 1996, industry representatives responded by setting up their own awards, the Nammys, or Native American Music Awards. With the genre thriving, advocates of the music hope that the Grammy recognition will help push an American Indian music album or two into the mainstream in the next year. In the mid-90's about 60 such albums were released. Now as many as 140 emerge each year, from traditional powwow music to New Age to rock to reggae to flamenco to a growing angry hip-hop movement from Native American M.C.'s.

Tom Bee, the owner of SOAR Records, who has been lobbying the recording academy for a decade about the category, said he received a call last week from Mr. Greene, who told him: ''Make sure you guys all look good. You're going to be on television.'' In other words, of the mere 14 Grammy Awards that will be presented live on network television, one is supposed to be best Native American music album.

''It's a giant leap for mankind,'' said Mr. Bee, who was nominated for producing the album ''Gathering of Nations Powwow.'' ''It's like landing an Indian on the moon. Do you realize how proud Native Americans watching the Grammys all over the country are going to be when they see that? It's going to inspire so many more musicians to come forth.''

One may ask why it took so long for the Grammys to add such a seemingly obvious category. Mr. Greene said the answer was Jethro Tull.

''The year before I started my job here, they added a hard-rock/metal category,'' he said, referring to the 1988 awards. ''But they had no voting members in that field. So the award went to Jethro Tull because, I guess, the flute is metallic. After that, I vowed that we wouldn't add another category without getting the members first.'' So Mr. Greene held off on granting the award until he and leaders of American Indian music could persuade enough members to join the recording academy and start a screening committee to nominate records. (To vote on the Grammys, one must have technical or creative credits on at least six different commercially released songs or albums.) The next challenge was figuring out what recordings were eligible. Did music from Canadians count? Yes. How about white musicians making Indian music? Yes (much to the consternation of many Indian musicians).

Some trace the current revival of the genre to the release of ''Music for the Native Americans'' documentary soundtrack by Robbie Robertson of the Band in 1994. But that is just one of many factors contributing to the addition of Indian sections in record store chains that formerly just filed such albums under New Age or world music.

There was also the success of the 1998 film ''Smoke Signals.'' The Indigo Girls took the vocal group Ulali on tour; B. B. King booked the sibling blues-rock group Indigenous on his touring blues festival; and Pearl Jam and Tori Amos played with the singer-songwriter Bill Miller. At the same time the genre is exploding with talent young and old: these include Mr. Miller, whose 1999 ''Ghostdance'' album has become one of the genre's standard-bearers; the songwriter Robert Mirabal; the guitarist Derek Miller; the gospel trio Walela; the folk singer Joanne Shenandoah; the flutist Mary Youngblood; and, one of the genre's most respected artists, John Trudell.

Then there are acts experimenting with more modern sounds, notably the rappers Shadowyze, Litefoot (who starred in the movie ''The Indian in the Cupboard''), Without a Reservation, the female M.C. Haida, and TKO, who mixes powwow drums with hip-hop. And groups like Lundar Drive experiment with electronic dance music.

With all this going for it, the American Indian music community is already clamoring for the addition of a second Grammy Award. ''By the end of the nominating committee meeting,'' said Ellen Bello, the chief executive of the Native American Music Foundation, which produces the Nammys, ''everyone attending thought that the genre was broad enough to warrant two categories: traditional and contemporary.''

The problem, those in the industry say, is that the modern acts are shut out of the new category in favor of more traditional music, and at the same time it isn't fair for powwow artists to have to compete with contemporary musicians who use electronic instruments. In the running tonight are three powwow albums, ''Tribute to the Elders'' by the Black Lodge Singers, ''Veterans Songs'' by Lakota Thunder, and the ''Gathering of Nations Powwow'' compilation. Then there is the haunting ''Cheyenne Nation'' by the flutist Joseph Fire Crow and ''Peacemaker's Journey,'' an ethereal, uplifting album by Ms. Shenandoah.

On Sunday at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage here, the Recording Academy presented a concert of American Indian music by Brulé, who played New Age-inflected instrumentals as atmospheric movies flashed in the background and a dancer twirled up and down the aisles. Like many of the genre's performers, the band's leader and keyboardist, Paul LaRoche, has an extremely interesting background: adopted by white middle-class parents in Minnesota, he was told that he was of French Canadian heritage. It wasn't until after their death, when Mr. LaRoche was in his mid-30's, that he discovered that he was American Indian. He moved to his birthplace, the Lower Brulé Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, and formed Brulé to explore his heritage in music.

''I've been so immersed in this process of the emergence of Native American music,'' Mr. LaRoche said after the show. ''You can take the culture and split it down the middle: you have native musicians playing all kinds of music, and you have native musicians playing Native American music.''

As for being shut out this year for being too contemporary, the ever optimistic Mr. LaRoche said that he didn't mind. ''I think it's appropriate if we start out by acknowledging our traditional artists, the pioneers,'' he said. ''Those of us working on this new front, we'll hang in there.''

Photo: Experimenting with modern sounds: Shadowyze, a Native American rapper. (pg. E3)